David Belbin - Bone & Cane

‘Don’t worry. Everyone’s dead relaxed about it these days. All the cops care about are violent drunks, you know?’

He handed the joint to Nick just as they were passing the Peacock.

‘Nick?’ It was Tony Bax, coming out of the pub. Up close, Tony had aged. There was grey in his beard. A paunch showed through his jacket.

‘Nick, good to see you!’ Tony threw his arms around Nick. ‘How are you?’

‘Surviving,’ Nick said, stupidly self conscious about the joint in his hand. Tony had never been a doper.

‘What was it like?’ Tony asked, in a sympathetic voice.

‘I won’t be going back again in a hurry.’

Tony focused pointedly on what was in Nick’s right hand.

‘Then I wouldn’t smoke that a hundred yards from the central police station. You’re on parole, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ Nick admitted. Tony was right. Having the joint was stupid. But the E was starting to kick in and this conversation felt uncomfortable. He tried to say something diplomatic. ‘I . . . eh . . .’

‘Sorry,’ Tony said, ‘Didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sure you know what you’re doing. Look, I’ve got to catch the last bus, but if there’s anything I can do, I’m still in the book, all right? Don’t be a stranger.’

He hurried up the hill to catch the Arnold bus.

‘Who was that old fart?’ Joe asked, as Nick returned the joint.

Nick didn’t reply.

The skunk might be stronger than it was five years before, but the Es weren’t. After they’d got past the queue, checked their coats and bought a drink, Nick took an extra half. Then he and Joe had a snort of speed in the bogs. When the drugs were working properly, he hit the dance floor. He found that E’ed up he liked to dance to the techno numbers best, because it didn’t matter if you knew them, they rocked, whereas the guitar songs sounded stodgy and retro. The last gig he’d been to here was Nirvana, in 1991, just as they were breaking big, and rock didn’t seem to have moved on since then. Tonight, when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came on, he felt the old throw-yourself-around-the-room exhilaration, the E, the speed and booze combining to give him a surge of wild energy.

Nick loved drugs: dope, speed, ecstasy, magic mushrooms and, later, when he had the brass, coke. He drew the line at smack: getting a habit was too big a risk. And acid. It wasn’t a fun drug. Acid took you deep inside yourself, deeper than he cared to go. He liked a drink with the drugs, too. People said you shouldn’t mix booze and E: they counteracted each other. He’d never seen it himself. More was more.

Joe was dancing closer and closer to a student in a tight camisole and leather jeans. Nick’s brother had taken off his round glasses and his wedding ring. Caroline had started her maternity leave and gone to visit her mother for a couple of days. Was Joe faithful to his wife? He used to be a philanderer, running three or four women at the same time. Caroline knew all this, had been aware that he wasn’t monogamous when she first went out with him. She went along with it for a while, then chucked him.

That was a first. Joe didn’t like being chucked. He thought it was a negotiation, but Caroline cut him out of her life. He left it a while, then asked her out. When Caroline didn’t come running back, he offered to stop seeing other women. Caroline let him know that she was seeing other guys. She made him beg, then got him back on exactly her terms. A few months later came the injury that ended Joe’s career. Caroline stuck with him and helped him set up the taxi firm. They married not long after Nick was sent down, but had waited four years to become parents.

Weird, your kid brother becoming a father before you. Nick used to think the world was too bad a place to bring children into, but prison had taught him that his old world was a damn good place, compared to most. What did Joe think? Nick and Joe didn’t have those kind of conversations. Joe had never come to Nick for advice.

Joe had left school and Sheffield at sixteen. Five years later he was at Notts County, the country’s oldest football club. Even though they’d ended up in the same city, he and Nick kept their distance. By the time Nick got his first teaching job, Joe was in the first team. He’d always been the successful one of the two of them, and let Nick know it. Then his career went tits up. Scratch Joe deep enough and he’d bleed a reservoir of resentment. Still, County were in the Second Division this year and Joe was thirty. If he’d stayed in the game, his playing days would be numbered.

The girl dancing with Joe would have been five when Nick started teaching, twelve when he finished. He thought about the last woman he’d slept with. During that final drug-fucked fling between his arrest and his conviction, Nick had found himself in bed with a former pupil. He’d picked her up in a club, didn’t even recognise her, and she hadn’t let on. In his bed the next morning, she’d repeated her name, said she’d had a big thing for him when she was in Year 8. Nick found that he could picture her, a dumpy girl with a bad haircut and crippling self-consciousness. Looking at her graceful, naked, adult body, he had pictured the twelve-year-old girl within and felt very old.

‘Why did you leave teaching anyway?’ she asked, as she dressed. ‘I’ve got a friend still in the sixth form. She said you just stopped turning up one day.’

‘I’d had enough,’ he told her. ‘Burnt out.’

‘I’m glad that’s all it was,’ she said, making him ashamed. ‘You know, there are stories going round, but I never believe gossip.’

Whatever the girl had seen in him, she’d exorcised it in that one night. When he phoned the number she’d given him, hoping for an encore, Nick found that it didn’t exist.

Both brothers found women to dance alongside, but neither pulled. It had taken Nick until he was thirty to develop the confidence required to pull at nightclubs – only for him to find that one-night stands were rarely exciting enough to justify the effort involved. He and Joe left Rock City at quarter to two, just before it closed. Cane Cars were fully booked, so they queued to take a black cab home.

This evening had confirmed what Nick had been expecting. His old world was no longer there for him. He was tainted, discredited, an embarrassment to all concerned. The only way to live with that kind of humiliation was to drop out of sight. Under the terms of his probation, he couldn’t leave the city, not unless he got a job elsewhere. His probation officer said there wasn’t much chance of him finding a job anywhere. Not soon, anyway.

That left the black economy or, if he was lucky, the grey one. Maybe now was the time to ask Joe a favour. Once they were back in the house and Joe was skinning up, Nick decided to chance it.

‘You’re always short of drivers after closing time,’ he said.

‘Yeah, the buggers can pick and choose. Some of them won’t even do evenings.’

‘What are the chances of me doing some driving for you? Sharing a cab.’

Joe gave him a lazy grin. ‘Are you tapping your little brother up for a job?’

‘What does it sound like?’

‘Oh, man . . .’ Joe took a hit on the joint. He smoked half an inch of the spliff before speaking again. ‘We can’t employ ex-cons. That’s the law. I’d lose my license.’

‘If I wore a pair of clear glasses, I could pass as you.’

Joe laughed at this, but Nick could tell it made him uncomfortable.

‘I don’t see you as a taxi driver,’ Joe said, after passing Nick the joint.

‘I can’t think what else I could do at the moment.’

‘You’d need to find somebody willing to share their cab with you. Generally, if two drivers share the same car, I charge them one and a half times the normal fee, seeing as they can’t both be working peak times. But the council would never license you, so it’d have to be off the books.’